Ava

How am I doing at playing this idiot gremlin child? Let me know!

PLEASE NOTE: I know the rest of Borderlands fandom hates her, if you are in that boat please keep your crit constructive. This probably isn't necessary, but if it seems like an overreaction please understand that defending her is a bannable offense on the game's subreddit.

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Lyndon
Contact: lovebelievesin
Age: 30
Other Characters: none

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Ava
Age: 15
Canon: Borderlands
Canon Point: Post Director’s Cut missions
Character Information: Ava specifically, the hub for info about the game campaign, other concepts can be accessed on the wiki
Personality:

So! Ava! Ava is a horrible little gremlin child who the rest of Borderlands fandom hates with an inexplicable passion (just kidding, it’s misogyny), but let’s talk about her for her suitability for, you know, being a monster and such. She’s difficult to get along with, sure, but she’s… getting to know her is probably worth it! … Probably! She has good points!

Ava is very skilled at… well, skills! She picks up new talents quickly and, even when she resents her teachers (shoutout to all of the monks), is pretty good at them! Art, music, bonsai tree maintenance, stealing, lock-picking, ancient alien superpowers? Ava is very good not only at figuring out what to do but thinking of new ways to use whatever it is she’s working with! She’s very good at solving problems on the fly as well, in addition to picking up new hobbies - finding routes and solutions to obstacles as they arise in missions where she’s with or guiding the player. Which ties into…

As implied by a few of her various hobbies and skills, Ava is a pretty creative girl! She likes making music, writing, drawing, and recently podcasting! She has a talent for all of them, and is a skilled and charismatic performer when she wants to be, especially evident in the way she hosts her podcast. Is it, textually, a joke about true crime and supernatural podcasts? Yes! Is she still good at it? Also yes! Art is, generally, how Ava expresses herself, when she is not expressing herself through crime. And what is crime if not the most dangerous of the performing arts? … Or graffiti, literally both an art and a crime! Regardless of the outlets she may or may not have to healthily express herself through art, she finds what she can! Even if she would 100% tag a wall of a building where she lives with her name and then when asked about it say “uh nope not me you got any other Avas in here???”

Ava believes very strongly in herself and her ability to push forward through things. She refuses to give up under basically any circumstance, pushing forward until she wins. This is… probably a result of the two and a half years spent living alone in the weird partial corporate dystopia that is the world of Borderlands, but like. Still, her refusal to give up is one of her stronger points! It gets her through a lot of trauma, and I mean a LOT of trauma. Basically her whole story is bad things happening to her and her becoming more and more determined to push through them.

Ava’s life has, to this point (at least in the last few years), been pretty fucked up actually! Her whole family was killed, then she spent two and a half years stowing away in various spaceships without a home learning to fend for herself, then she found a temporary home with Maya and the monks on Athenas, then… well, Maya died and Lilith vanished and she was left alone again! She straight up mentions not remembering the last time she had a friend her age, and while she’s trying to get out and open up more while making her spooky podcast, there’s still a long way she has to go before not being like. Partially feral. She is not possessed of social graces - not to the point of, say, Tina and her explosives and tea parties with bug monsters, but she’s not very good at connecting to people on an emotional level. She’ll make jokes and do shenanigans all day, but actually forming emotional connections? Way too many trust issues and way too little experience for that shit.

In an unfortunate combo with being so poorly adjusted, Ava is not actually happy about being so bad with people! She would love to be better with people! She does her best to connect, but is thwarted by the fact that she doesn’t know how and also how her mentor figures keep exploding. She does her best to cover it up, but like… she wants friends, man. She wants a social life. Even if she’s a weirdo. She’s found some by now in the citizens of Sanctuary and the Vault Hunters, but even there she doesn’t have many strong connections. She’s been sort of thrust into a leadership position that she doesn’t entirely know what to do with by Lilith before her departure, and while she’s doing her best with it? It’s not the best for forming connections with others as peers.

Coming back to the headstrong thing - that’s the positive side, but it also leads to basically all of her greatest weaknesses as a person! While Ava’s refusal to give up tends to get her through the things she needs to get through, it also means that she has great difficulty backing down or retreating, even when either of those would be a much better idea than any solution she could manage in the moment! This literally gets people killed in incidents that traumatize her! Backing down especially from attacks on her person is difficult for her, and it’s unfortunately stronger the more room she has to put her foot in her mouth.

So I also mentioned she’s good at creative problem-solving, and that’s absolutely true! … But also, much of the time, it’s not what she thinks to do. Ava is a fifteen-year-old girl, and is as much a prisoner of the standard impulses of that age as any other. She has a strong tendency to, despite being capable of finding a clever solution or workaround, charge through with the first solution to come to mind instead, which tends to be troublesome for her and everyone around her! She’s been working on this, especially since Maya’s death, but like. She’s very set in her convictions and very quick to pick a path of action when the chips are down.

And, finally, it’s the thing everyone hates her for!! While I’ll defend Ava and her participation in the circumstances of Maya’s death from anyone, this is still part of her that bears mentioning: she is very bad at taking instructions and very good at resenting authority, especially authority she considers unearned. Even Maya, who was the only person she even nominally listened to, was not immune from her authority being shirked when Ava thought strongly enough that she had the wrong idea!

5-10 Key Personality Traits:
Clever
Creative
Headstrong
Maladjusted
Yearning
Stubborn
Impulsive
Disobedient

Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Either!
Opt-Outs: Simulacrum, lich, shade, slime
Roleplay Sample:

[ Being thrown back hundreds of years into the past is a baffling experience no matter what year a person starts at, it turns out. Ava feels like she’s been stuck into one of those, what are they called… isekais? The old Earth animes? Where someone would get hit by a primitive-ass truck and go to a fantasy world?

Which means that she’s currently being flummoxed by something totally normal: a very very old computer. ]

Oh my god, you really just do freaking nothing don’t you? I get that one measly planet doesn’t need access to the full ECHOnet, but-

[ She groans, lying back on the… it’s not a bed, because she doesn’t trust any of the “free” housing options she’s been offered. It’s a mattress, sort of, in the sense that it’s relatively soft, and she managed to steal enough sheets to cover the smell, and found a place in an alley where no one will notice her. It’s as good as she figures she’ll get on her own here. She’s been through worse!

........... ]

… This might be untenable, now that I think about it.

[ It doesn’t even have voice recognition. This is the worst. What’s she supposed to do, type? With her hands?? She sighs and starts to one-finger pick away at a message. ]

myseriouslier:

ughhhh ok fuckin fine yall win
can someone tell me where i’m supposed to live that isnt an alleyway
not to traumadump or w/e but im not actually cool going back to living on the street

[ Who won? Why include that last line? Listen. She’s not stupid enough to do something like admit defeat on the internet, no matter the year. ]